Wednesday, May 23, 2012

At the Circus!

This is a piece I did for a class project waaay long ago back in the winter of 2010. I get a lot of questions on it, so I thought I'd go over my process. I was messing around a bit with line weight and color, and am pretty happy with the results.

A couple roughs

After we rounded down to the 2 best ideas... (The dynamics of the circular composition of the clown poster and the character design of the Strong Man poster), we go to pencils sketching...

Ohhhhh, the spinning... urp!

Strong Man "AAAARRRGGGHHH"... toot!

After the pencils, I go and tighten up the sketch a bit more. From here I go and transfer to illustration board. I make sure that the lines are visible before I go to the inks. My personal favorite inks are Dr. Ph. Martin's Matte Black Star and Speedball Super Black. For me they have the densest coverage and best fluidity. I use a range (3, 5, 7) of Windsor Newton Series 7 brushes that I will probably have for life. Best brush I have ever used! Also, while inking I will sometimes use nibs and Sakura Micron pens. I use Microns and tech pens when I inking man-made objects and brushes and nibs when I want more organic feel.

Since I was going for a more "olde-timey" feel I wanted to change the color and harshness of the lines. So after I scanned in the inkwork I turned them a brownish tint.

From here I just start dropping in and playing with color in Photoshop.

Finally to help make it look aged and stained I throw in some paper textures on opacity layers, some scratch and rips alpha channels, and burn the edges a bit to deepen and age it more.